News Release: Congressional Commission is Not Needed

(Harrisburg) — Those pushing for the legalization of abortion said it would create a world where all children would be wanted and loved. Child abuse would disappear and ‘we’d all live happily ever after.’ The exact opposite has happened. The American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA), a statewide child advocacy group, has responded to the passage of the Protect Our Kids Act, H.R. 6655, last month.

“Congress has taken the steps to set up a commission to present recommendations to prevent deaths due to child abuse and neglect. This is simply a feel- good law and commission while Congress is ignoring the real causes of the increase in child deaths due to abuse and neglect — the proliferation of illegal obscenity and the breakdown of the family,” commented Diane Gramley, president of the AFA of PA.

In April 2011 Attorney General Eric Holder shuttered the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. Pressure exerted on the President and Attorney General to enforce the federal obscenity laws has been rebuffed.

M.L. Healy, “Child pornography: an international perspective”:

Preferential child molesters often possess large collections of child pornography that are meticulously catalogued and carefully guarded. They, however, are not the only ones who produce or consume child pornography. A much broader segment of the population is interested in pornography featuring pubescent children in their teens. Additionally, with the emergence of the use of computers to traffic in child pornography, a new and growing segment of producers and consumers is being identified. They are individuals who may not have a sexual preference for children, but who have seen the gamut of adult pornography and who are searching for more bizarre material.

From the Witherspoon Institute’s “Marriage and the Public Good:” The family environment provided by marriage allows children to grow, mature, and flourish. It is a seedbed of sociability and virtue for the young, who learn from both their parents and their siblings. Specifically, the married family satisfies children’s need to know their biological origins, connects them to both a mother and father, establishes a framework of love for nurturing the young, oversees their education and personal development, and anchors their identity as they learn to move about the larger world. These are not merely desirable goods, but what we owe to children as vulnerable beings filled with potential. Whenever humanly possible, children have a natural human right to know their mother and father, and mothers and fathers have a solemn obligation to love their children unconditionally. . . . The virtues acquired within the family—generosity, self-sacrifice, trust, self-discipline—are crucial in every domain of social life. Children who grow up in broken families often fail to acquire these elemental habits of character. When marital breakdown or the failure to form marriages becomes widespread, society is harmed by a host of social pathologies, including increased poverty, mental illness, crime, illegal drug use, clinical depression, and suicide.

A more recent study from the University of Texas found children do best being raised in an intact family with their biological mother and father. “Dr. Mark Regenerus found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings like these contradict claims that there are no differences between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the University of Texas.

Instead, “[C]hildren appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.”

“The studies have been done – no new taxpayer dollars need be spend on a commission. All Congress needs to do is pass laws that stop abortion, encourage one man one woman marriage and ban no fault divorce so children are brought up in intact families and see that the DOJ does its job in enforcing the federal obscenity laws,” Gramley further remarked.